Though ONAP is officially just over a year old, Datavision has a long history with the open source platform. We’ve been supporting it before it was even called ONAP — our network engineers worked with one of the predecessors, AT&T’s Enhanced Control Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP), before it merged with the Open Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O) to build the Linux Foundation’s Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project in February 2017.
Did you know that ONAP now supports more than 60 percent of all mobile subscribers in the world? And the list is growing — Verizon joined as a Platinum member in January, citing a desire to be involved with network virtualization innovation and a hope for “a standardized way for vendors’ products to interoperate with each other,” according to SDxCentral. (In other ONAP news, the Linux Foundation reorganized six open source projects, including ONAP, into The LF Networking Fund, Light Reading reported in January.)
The other 50+ ONAP members include AT&T, Bell Canada, China Telecom, Cisco, Equinix, Ericsson, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Orange, Red Hat, VMware, Vodafone, ZTE and many more. (Full list here.) It’s something of a “who’s who” for telecom.
In the Linux Foundation’s words, “ONAP uniquely provides a unified operating framework for vendor-agnostic, policy-driven service design, implementation, analytics and lifecycle management for large-scale workloads and services, such as VoLTE, residential vCPE and more.”
Bell Canada is already using ONAP code, SDxCentral reports, and China Telecom has plans to use it for vCPE and VoLTE. The ONAP team is aiming to send out Beijing, its next release, this summer. (The current version is Amsterdam.) Beijing is expected to include enterprise-focused and 5G-related features for data centers and SD-WAN, according to SDxCentral.
Datavision’s Involvement
We remain committed to the ONAP-based solution because it’s vital to the work we’re doing in SDN, and because, at a higher level, it’s helping to economically deliver new network virtualization technologies to our clients. Since Datavision is in the business of future-proofing networks, ONAP is a natural fit for us.
There are other similar open source projects, namely ETSI’s Open Source MANO (OSM), but we’ve chosen to work with ONAP because of our partnerships with carriers and other providers backing the project, and because we’ve witnessed the value it brings to the table and believe in its future. The sheer amount of companies jumping on board is further validation of this decision! We’ve been supporting this project since AT&T’s team was building the robust 8 million lines of code that made up ECOMP.
What we bring to the table in terms of ONAP is hands-on integration work between ONAP components and the rest of a carrier’s or enterprise’s infrastructure. Our integration experience and software development capabilities help clients leverage ONAP in existing BSS/OSS systems.
Since we’ve had operational experience with this project for years, we’re experts in helping companies work through the requirements and operationalization of ONAP, to weave the code into their existing environments and make them more agile and efficient. At this point, many ONAP-backed deployments are the first, or one of the first, of their kind. With the help of Datavision’s expert team, you can leverage this transformational tool while it’s in the early release stage, so you can stay ahead of the competition. Contact us to learn more.
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